This thesis seeks to establish, confirm, or deny the existence of white English slaves serving white English masters on West Indies plantations during the reign of James II, circa 1685, as reported in Lord Macaulay's History of England. Additionally, the work strives to document the lives and fates of those slaves, if such they were, whose contributions to the formation of the plantation complex in the Atlantic world profoundly affected the course of European imperial expansion in numerous ways, including the transition to pre-industrial capitalism; the end of manorial serfdom, birth of contract labor, and adoption of African slavery; the evolution of European cultural consciousness of race, ethnicty, and nationalism; and many other areas. Macaulay's propagandist discussion, or Whig martyrology, of the Stuart enslavement of the Duke of Monmouth's Rebels seems strange, in that it contradicts the traditonal depiction of colonial indentured servitude as a benign career opportunity. This subject provides an ideal test platform for the cultural micro-history approach of historian Robert Darnton, whose "taste for strangeness" often produces "some positive effects, if only as an antidote to false historical consciousness." The forgotten lives of these subaltern subjects could provide what Darnton refers to as "curious, out-of-the-way corners." It is possible that in these dark corners lie important truths about collective English consciousness in the seventeenth century. In understanding that consciousness, the origins of politicized distortions, such as the pervasive unifying myths of national and racial superiority, may be discerned, and the false historical consciousness surrounding the origins of servitude and slavery, both in theory and in practice, may be dispelled.